S. Brent Plate, visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., has published widely (in both scholarly and news venues) on the topic of blasphemy and offensive art.

Plate, who says it takes two (a viewer and an artist) to make a blasphemous painting, nevertheless sees the good in so-called blasphemous art. “I welcome the blasphemous in part because it continues to show how much we do continue to hold sacred,” he says. “It shows us our values, our lines of division, our fighting words, our limits in general.”

At a time when legal efforts, at least in California, are being made to curb circumcisions, it’s worth looking at what, if anything, the centuries-old artistic tradition of representing circumcision can bring to the conversation.

It’s pretty clear that there is no way around the fact that 99 percent of the circumcision representations amount to a similarly choreographed scene — several adults — often bearded men — hunched over a very helpless infant, usually Jesus.

A provocative drawing by David Wander — part of his larger series on the Book of Esther — questions whether the Jewish holiday of Shavuot is really as happy as it is purported to be, or whether the revelation at Sinai was part of a sinister plot in which the Israelites were forced to accept Old Testament law.
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